FEATURETo Chat or Not to Chat —
Taking Yet Another Look at Virtual Reference, Part 2
[Part 1]by Steve Coffman
Vice President, Business Development  LSSI, Inc.
and Linda Arret
Library Consultant  Reference Services and Technologies In our first exciting episode ("To Chat or Not To
Chat: Taking Another Look at Virtual Reference," Searcher,
July/August 2004; http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/jul04/arret_coffman.shtml),
we took a look at the history of chat reference in
libraries. We saw how libraries began enthusiastically
adopting commercial chat and Web contact center software
starting in the late 1990s. We were in hopes that these
new technologies would help us to reverse steep declines
in level of traffic at many traditional reference desks
and to fend off increasing competition from dozens
of upstart commercial reference services, including
WebHelp, that then threatened to eat our lunch.

Unfortunately, chat reference has not turned out
to be the panacea many of us hoped for. Studies by
Joe Janes and others show that the numbers of questions
asked on chat reference services are, generally speaking,
abysmally low. Janes' Census of Digital Reference finds
chat services get a median of just six questions per
day and evidence gathered from a broad spectrum of
other libraries shows similarly low levels of usage  even
among services that have been up and running for several
years. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule,
with a few services reporting thousands of questions
per month. However, most of these reports come from
collaborative services made up of many libraries and,
on closer inspection, most of the individual libraries
making up the collaboratives show the same low levels
of use seen in other virtual reference services.

Data gathered over the last few years shows that
chat can also be a very expensive way to answer a reference
question. First comes the cost of the chat or Web contact
software; then the cost of training the staff to use
it. And most librarians find it difficult to handle
chat and other reference functions at the same time,
so managers have to pull staff off the desk and dedicate
them to monitoring the chat terminal during all the
open hours  regardless of how many questions
come in. Finally, when a question does come in, evidence
from commercial chat services such as those offered
by LL Bean and LandsEnd indicates that it usually take
twice as long to answer via chat as over the phone.
Add up all the costs, and the cost per question in
a chat reference service can be downright horrendous,
especially at the average rate of six questions per
day.

If librarians had all the money in the world, it
might not matter. With unlimited funds, we could offer
reference service round the clock through every communications
channel  wireless, IM, text messaging, video
conferencing, kiosks, etc. Sad to say, we do not have
unlimited funds. In fact, libraries operate with tight
or even shrinking budgets. Many chat services originally
started using grant money and those grants are beginning
to run out. Librarians face tough decisions on how
best to "shoe-horn" new chat reference services into
library budgets already stretched way too thin or whether
to abandon the fledgling services altogether. To make
the hard decisions, we need to take a hard, honest
look at the options for chat reference going forward.
What are the alternatives?

PULLING THE PLUG

If you have a virtual reference service that does
not live up to your expectations, the first and most
obvious solution is to just "pull the plug." A few
brave librarians have tried chat and then opted out.
A couple more well-known examples are the now defunct
chat services at Vanderbilt University, MIT, and Los
Alamos National Labs. Perhaps the most interesting
case, however, is the Library of Congress  one
of the earliest proponents of digital reference services
and the defacto flagship of OCLC's QuestionPoint reference
service. LC has not exactly closed its chat service,
but it has severely curtailed it over the past couple
of years. Soon after the Library of Congress moved
from its pilot CDRS service to QuestionPoint in June
2002, 11 of the LC's reference divisions were offered
chat service for at least 1 hour per day. As of April
2004, eight of those 11 units had closed down their
chat reference and were offering only e-mail. All these
libraries (and no doubt others that we haven't uncovered)
have simply made the decision that the value gotten
from chat services did not justify the investment and
decided to spend their money and efforts elsewhere.
That's one way to handle an underperforming chat service,
but it is not the only option.

MAKING IT WORK BETTER

If you don't like the idea of killing off your chat
service, then try to improve the way it works. Generally
when people talk about improving chat services, they
focus on marketing and other ideas for increasing the
number of people using the service. However, as we
seen, usage is only part of the problem; the other
is cost. And if you succeed in increasing usage without
reducing costs, you could get the library into a tight
space financially pretty quickly, considering what
it costs to answer questions virtually and that costs
per question do not go down significantly as volume
increases. On the other hand, there is probably not
a library in the world that could not do a better job
marketing itself in general and its virtual reference
services in particular.

Marketing works. The experience of services like
QandA NJ and KnowItNow in Cleveland clearly indicate
that one can get a respectable number of questions
with some attention to publicity and a few lucky breaks.
And Tutor.com's experience helping libraries to advertise
its live homework help service  a specialized
form of virtual reference  to school children
with pizza parties and the like also indicates that
modest amounts of money can have significant impact
when targeted to the right audience.

However, just how much can marketing do? Few companies
on the Web have more exposure or marketing clout than
Google. Yet with over 200,000,000 searches per day,
it never has attracted more than a couple of hundred
questions per day to Google Answers and, in recent
months, the average has dropped down to around 60-70.
Granted, you do have to pay for the service, but at
an average fee of $15-$20 hardly seems much of a barrier.
However, the most compelling evidence that marketing
can only help so much is the untimely demise of live
reference services such as WebHelp and of the commercial
reference market in general. Many of these services
spent millions of dollars of venture capital money
on marketing. WebHelp even put up a giant, two-story-high
neon revolving sign on the busiest street in Toronto,
as well as banner ads all over the Web. While those
antics may have bought some traffic for awhile, it
was not enough to make for a sustainable business model
and today all are gone  along with the millions
spent trying to market their services. The limited
traffic at Google Answers and the demise of well-funded
commercial reference services on the Web raise some
serious questions about just how much people really
need or want reference services online  no matter
how well marketed  at least in the ways we have
offered up until now. Finally, if marketing could help
us increase the use of virtual reference services,
couldn't it just as well attract people to traditional
reference services?

What about reducing the costs of virtual reference?
There are a variety of ways to accomplish this. Look
at staff costs first; they constitute one of the biggest
expenses in operating a virtual reference service.
If you currently staff your virtual reference service
separately, consider moving it to the regular reference
desk. Although many librarians would not recommend
this, the fact of the matter is, some libraries have
successfully run a chat service from their regular
desk  particularly if desk traffic is light and
you only get a few chat questions each day. Another
approach is to contract out staff. Both Tutor.com and
Docutek offer after-hours and weekend staffing services
for virtual reference, and several libraries have asked
them to run their virtual reference services altogether
to free up their own staff for other work. This could
be a very reasonable option  particularly for
services not getting a lot of traffic. Because of economies
of scale, vendors can often provide virtual reference
services much less expensively than individual libraries
can do on their own. And these services sometimes employ
more experienced virtual reference librarians, because
they are answering thousands of questions each week.
So the quality may be as good or better than what you
can offer yourself.

Another way to reduce costs is to join a consortia.
Typically in these arrangements, libraries share reference
responsibilities and the cost of software, and some
also share other expenses like marketing, access to
subject specialists, etc. You still have to help staff
the virtual reference desk, but only for a few hours
a week  the rest of the schedule is covered by
your partner libraries. The consortial model has another
advantage. The staff you assign probably won't have
to worry about twiddling their thumbs waiting for questions
to come in. They will be answering questions coming
from everyone in the consortia. Consortia do have their
downsides; you may not have much control over the quality
of reference others do in your name, and you have to
go along with the software and policies that the group
has adopted. If you are willing to comply with consortial
policies and procedures, however, it can save you some
money  and perhaps enable you to provide a better
service than you could afford on your own.

Finally, you can save money on software costs. Much
has been written comparing the costs and features of
the many versions of virtual reference software, and
we have neither the space nor the stamina to try to
recap it all here. Suffice it to say, that virtual
reference software is available in many different price
ranges, starting at free and going up to $50,000­$100,000
or more depending on the brand of the software, the
size of the system, and the features you want. Some
people have argued that free or low-cost systems like
AOL, MSN, or Yahoo! Instant Messaging may suffice to
do online reference, especially if you only get a few
questions a day. However, others claim that the more
sophisticated and expensive packages are necessary
to do an effective job with database co-browsing and
other special reference needs. Study how much you really
use and need the special features. No matter what you
decide, keep the software costs in perspective.

Overall, however, evidence indicates that staffing
costs could be the most important consideration. Look
for alternative technologies and strategies that can
affect staffing demands.

ALTERNATIVES TO VIRTUAL REFERENCE

Rather than asking the question, "How do I do virtual
reference?"  a question answered by "Virtual
Reference Desk" conferences, seminars, teleconferences,
etc.  we should ask the broader and more fundamental
question: "How can I best serve my patrons wherever
they happen to be?" Perhaps there are better ways than
chat of accomplishing the same purposes.

Answer the Phone

Well over 90 percent of American households have
had traditional landline telephone service for years  far
greater than the number of households with computers
and greater still than those with Internet access.
Over the past 10 years, millions of us have been buying
cell phones so we can talk anywhere we happen to be.
According to the Statistical Abstract of the U.S.,
the number of people with cell phones has jumped from
22 million in 1995 to over 140 million in 2002. That's
over 70 percent of the total adult population  and
it is continuing to grow at the rate of 15-20 million
new subscribers a year. At that rate, it won't be long
before almost anybody older than 10 will be running
around with one on their belt or in their purse or
backpack.

Not only is the number of phones growing, but their
technical capabilities are also improving. Many can
now take and receive color pictures, keep track of
personal address books and calendars, send and receive
e-mail, browse the Web, even serve as portable GPS
systems and route finders. In fact, the cell phone
is well on its way to becoming a kind of personal information
center most of us have on us wherever we go.

Despite the growth of the Internet, the telephone
is still the way most of us receive information and
get questions answered. While few companies offer chat
or any other kind of live communication on their Web
sites, almost all can be reached by phone  many
24 hours a day. And not just for simple questions,
either. Many companies use the phone and Web site together
to help answer questions and provide customer support.
And it can work effectively for online databases support
as well; both LexisNexis and Westlaw have offered research
assistance over the phone 24 hours a day for a very
long time now  but neither offers chat.

The telephone remains the communications channel
of choice for most of our patrons as well  at
least when they can't visit us at the desk. Telephone
reference at most public libraries far exceeds anything
ever gotten in chat. Just remember those statistics
from Santa Monica Public Library that appeared in our
previous article. This library routinely handles over
16,000 phone questions per month (over 40 percent of
the total reference count) over the phone, while chat
is lucky to exceed 100 questions per month. When the
Main Library was moved for a brief period, telephone
reference for that month shot up by over 4,400 calls,
while e-mail questions only rose by 30 and chat by
just 25.

Of course, most libraries have offered telephone
service for a long time, but we have done little or
nothing to emphasize it or even improve how we manage
and integrate it with other new technologies and reference
tools. What about 24/7 telephone reference? In the
past few years, existing late-night telephone reference
services in New Jersey and Massachusetts have actually
been shut down. We have several dozen statewide virtual
reference projects, but none include the telephone.

Some libraries seem to treat telephone patrons as
second-class citizens. They may set limits on the number
of questions a user can ask over the phone or the length
of time a librarian will spend answering them (often
three questions or 5 minutes), although no such rules
apply to chat. In fact, the average chat runs about
15 minutes  three times as long as what's often
allowed on the phone. For example, look at the differential
treatment of chat and phone patrons at UCLA Libraries.
As mentioned previously, UCLA has a nice chat service
that operates 46 hours per week until 9 P.M. most weeknights
and it even has a cute little PacMan-like icon for
it right on its home page. But take a look at the library's
telephone service. For the Research Library, the largest
library on campus, telephone reference is only available
from 10­11 A.M.  1 hour  Monday-Friday;
and as you might imagine, it's not too easy to get
through to them even then. Although some of the smaller
libraries have somewhat better hours, none of them
are open past 6 P.M. Chat continues until 9 P.M. Also
telephone patrons are advised, "Because priority is
given to users in the libraries, callers may be asked
to hold." Chat patrons get no such warning.

Originally, many librarians got into virtual reference
because we felt that most of our patrons were turning
to the Web to get their information and we wanted to
be there to serve them when they needed help. Back
4 years ago, when most people connected to the Web
over dial-up connections, chat was the only way to
communicate with them live, and the phone was not an
option because the users had their phone lines tied
up with the computer. But that is no longer true. Today,
with the growth of DSL, cable, and other broadband
connections and with the ever-increasing number of
cell phones, the number of people who have to use chat
to communicate while online is steadily declining and,
at least in the U.S., dial-up Internet connections
will be largely a thing of the past within the next
few years.

Evidence shows that plain old telephone reference
could have some distinct advantages over chat technologies:

Most patrons have easy access to the
technology. Most already have one phone, some have
two or more. So, no problems with the "digital divide" and
no software to download or configure. Most phones
work in the same way; no need to worry about whether
your
patron has a PC or a Mac or what version of what
operating system they might use, as with chat.

Libraries already have the technology
in place. No software or hardware to buy; nothing
to download or configure. Just let people know your
number,
then sit back and wait for the calls to come in.
Of course, if you want to put in sophisticated call
centers,
collaborate with other libraries, set up statewide
or worldwide projects, or have staff work from
home, you will probably need to invest in some additional
telecommunications infrastructure. However, unlike
some of the chat and Web collaboration software
we've
tried to use over the past few years, your advanced
telephone system will probably work very well,
because call center and associated communications
tools have
de-bugged the system for years.

Librarians would need no special training.
Most of us are pretty comfortable with basic phone
technology.

Questions can be answered a lot faster.
Studies at commercial call centers show that the
same question takes about half as long to answer
over the
phone as it does in chat. There is no comparable
research for reference work, but still no reason
to suspect
it would differ.

Librarians will no longer have to
fret about misspellings or trying to figure out that
cute
chat lingo like g2g or brb.

Even the online research assistance
provided through virtual reference could be done
just as well
using the phone. Both LexisNexis and Westlaw have
a long history of providing database assistance over
the phone, and thousands of companies use a combination
of the phone, the Web, and e-mail to answer complicated
questions and offer support services of all sorts.

So, if we are really worried about serving our remote
patrons, perhaps we should take a little closer look
at a technology we already have  the telephone.
It may not be new and sexy, but it does work and it
is a tried and true method of providing reference service
at a distance  even on Web.

Do a Better Job with E-Mail

Offer a more effective asynchronous reference service
using either e-mail or Web forms in place of chat.
Libraries have been doing e-mail reference for quite
awhile now and  up until now anyway  it
has never gotten much use  even less use than
chat. In his Digital Reference Census, for example,
Joe Janes found that e-mail or Web forms only accounted
for 30 percent of 8,106 questions, while chat accounted
for 70 percent. And most libraries have found similar
results. In fact, it was the low usage on e-mail reference
that spurred many libraries to get into chat in the
first place. So don't expect e-mail to do much to improve
the usage of your online reference services.

On the other hand, it could do a lot to reduce your
expenses. E-mail is a considerably less-expensive proposition
than live virtual reference. It does not require expensive
software. You probably already have what you need on
your computer and, even if you have enough volume to
require an e-mail management system, like Altarama
or QuestionPoint, these are normally much less expensive
than virtual reference software. E-mail is relatively
low-tech, so there is little to break or go wrong.
It works with almost any computer regardless of brand
or operating system. Most important, e-mail reference
is much easier to staff and to integrate within existing
reference operations than a chat service. You won't
need to dedicate staff to sit in front of a terminal
and wait for questions to come in as you do with virtual
reference. Somebody merely has to check the inbox regularly
in between other tasks. And, because people who e-mail
questions don't expect an immediate response (otherwise
they'd call), staff can work on the question as other
duties permit, as long as they make sure to get back
to the patron within a reasonable length of time.

E-mail reference also allows staff the luxury of
pondering and exploring the question a bit without
the pressure of having to deliver an answer on the
spot as with chat, phone, and other live reference
channels. Although some claim that the reference interview
and follow-up can be difficult and time-consuming with
e-mail reference, it certainly does not seem much of
a problem for Google Answers, which relies entirely
on an e-mail-, Web-form-based system and offers no
chat, Web collaboration, or live communication of any
sort between customer and researcher. So if it's good
enough for Google, there's a good chance it could work
well for us as well.

Finally, if libraries offered better turnaround
on e-mail questions, our patrons just might use it
more. Benchmark Portal, a call center research service
at Purdue University, found that the companies with
the highest customer satisfaction scores responded
to e-mails within 3 hours, although most customers
said they would be satisfied with a 24-hour response
time [http://www.benchmarkportal.com/newsite/article_detail.taf?topicid=31].
But libraries are often way off those marks. A 48-hour
or 2-business-day response time is common in many libraries,
and some stretch it even further. The Library of Congress
requires "5 business days." Google Answers states that
most questions are answered within 24 hours and, although
hardly doing a "box office" business, it still gets
many more questions that most libraries do over the
Web. Santa Monica Public Library offers a 2-hour turnaround
during regular business hours and 24 hours over the
weekend, and it routinely receives more e-mail questions
than chat. While offering a 2-hour turnaround may require
the staff to hustle a little to meet deadlines, it
still would be nowhere near as demanding as on-the-spot
answers from a chat reference service.

If you want to reduce costs, but still preserve
some reference services online, try e-mail, but keep
it on a tight schedule.

Improve Self-Service

What do most people use first to help them find
information on the Web? Most people  including
most librarians  would probably answer Google.
The book-oriented might answer Amazon. While some librarians
debated how to catalog the Web, Google built a search
engine that, though not perfect, helps most of us find
what we want well enough that it has become the one
place most people turn to first when looking for information
online. Amazon leveraged the capabilities of the Web
to build the largest bookstore the world has ever seen.
To help people find what they wanted among those millions
of titles, Amazon redefined the catalog, adding lengthy
book descriptions, reviews, cover art, spell checkers,
excerpts, and, most recently, its "Search Inside the
Book" full-text feature.

For all their success, neither Google nor Amazon
offers even the most minimal kind of chat service or
instant messaging or phone service, to say nothing
of the elaborate Web collaboration tools featured in
some virtual reference software. The closest you can
come to interacting with a live human being on either
site is to fill out a Web form and wait for them to
get back to you  and neither service makes that
very easy, either. In Amazon, the "contact us" feature
is buried many layers down in the site  deep
beneath the FAQs; with Google Answers, you have to
pay for the privilege.

Both services focus attention and money on improving
the self-service functions of the sites. Both have
built information systems that provide most people
on the Web with the answers they need whenever they
need them. The systems are fast, scaleable, and don't
require users to type messages back and forth. The
answers may not always be perfect  but then,
neither are we.

What if we take the money and time spent developing
and running chat services on improving our Web sites
and information systems? Although library automation
vendors have struggled to keep up, even our best library
catalogs still look no better than pale copies of Amazon.
The commercial databases that cost us so much often
have clunky, difficult-to-use interfaces. Too often
information on our sites is organized by vendor, instead
of by the patron's information needs. We still use
bibliographic records designed to fit on 3x5 cards
that look like skeletal remains compared to the rich
descriptions you find in Amazon or other modern-day
catalogs. We've neglected to take advantage of new
technologies like collaborative filtering and others
that help personalize sites like Amazon. Libraries
could do a lot more to make it easier for our patrons
to find information on their own.

The problem is, of course, that we don't have the
kind of resources that Amazon and Google can bring
to the table. Or do we? Google started out as a student
project and built itself into the Web's premier search
engine with $25 million in venture capital funding.
And although it is difficult to get detailed information
on how Amazon financed its infrastructure, we do know
that the American Booksellers Association and around
1,000 independent bookstores (most even more poverty
stricken than libraries) got together and created Booksense.com,
an Amazon-like catalog and fulfillment system that
allowed even the smallest independents to open up online
stores with an inventory of over 2.5 million titles.
The Booksense program also includes branding (slogan  "Book
Sense  Independent Bookstores for Independent
Minds"), a major national marketing program, as well
as in-store promotional material and a gift certificate
program  good at all participating bookstores.
Cost per store  a $375 start-up fee plus $175
per month. Far less than most libraries pay for their
catalogs, which don't come with national marketing
programs.

The point here is that some of the major improvements
we've seen in information retrieval on the Web may
cost less than you might think. If libraries got together
like the independent booksellers and devoted a small
percentage of the resources tied up in virtual reference
to improving the self-help features of our Web sites,
we might have more to show for it. And unlike our reference
services, Web self-service is eminently scalable. It
costs Google or Amazon about the same amount of money
to handle 6 patrons a day as it does 600 million. But
answering questions one by one, as in library reference
services, means even small increases in demand require
large increases in costs that could quickly deplete
the coffers of even the wealthiest libraries.

Let us link forces and apply some of the money and
effort we spend trying to get patrons to ask us questions
on the Web to make it easier for patrons to find the
information they need on their own.

THE BOTTOM LINE

We've looked at the history of virtual reference.
We've seen how libraries scrambled to move their reference
services to the Web. We've documented what happened  or
what didn't happen  once we set up shop
there. We've examined how we might increase usage and/or
reduce costs of existing chat reference services. We've
taken a look at some of the alternative strategies
and technologies that might accomplish the objectives
we had hoped to achieve with chat-based virtual reference.
We've done everything but answer the very fundamental
question we set for ourselves at the beginning of this
article ... "to chat or not to chat?" And the answer
is a great big "it depends."

There are a variety of factors any library should
take into consideration before deciding whether to
start a new chat-based virtual reference service or
to continue one already up and running. First and foremost,
what are you trying to accomplish? In the early days,
most of us would have answered that we were trying
to do a better job helping our patrons looking for
information on the Web. But there are other reasons
a library might consider virtual reference service.
A number of libraries and library consortia have used
the technology to deliver specialized reference services  like
Spanish-language reference or requiring subject expertise
from business, law, and medical librarians  to
libraries and patrons who might not otherwise have
access to them. A very few libraries, like the Singapore
National Library, have looked at virtual reference
technology as a less-expensive and more-efficient way
of providing remote reference service to smaller branches,
including the completely self-service Sengkang Regional
Branch. There may be other legitimate reasons, depending
on the kind of patrons you serve and the type of information
and assistance you want to deliver. There is also one
not-so-legitimate reason for getting into virtual reference
and that's because somebody says it's the "cool" thing
to do or because everybody else seems to be doing it.
Unfortunately, that factor has probably played a more
significant role in many recent virtual reference start-ups
than many of us would like to admit.

Whatever your purpose for considering chat-based
virtual reference, the next critical question you need
to answer is whether chat reference is the most effective
way of accomplishing that purpose. Virtual reference
is not an end in itself. It is a tool  a method
of accomplishing a particular purpose. And it may not
always be the best method. For example, if you want
to do a better job serving patrons on the Web, you
may well question the value of chat technology. With
the growth of DSL, cable, and other high-speed connections,
a growing number of people no longer need chat to communicate
with each other online. A combination of phone reference
and basic page-pushing or co-browsing technology, or
a combination of phone reference and e-mail, may prove
more effective and efficient for answering questions
online. The Singapore National Library came to that
decision when it designed its "reference kiosks" for
the self-service Sengkang Branch. The kiosks feature
a computer monitor with co-browsing capabilities coupled
with a standard telephone, so the patron and librarian
can talk while online, but with no keyboard and no
chat. Originally, the system had a built-in videoconference
facility so patron and librarian could see each other
during the interaction, but that was dropped when it
turned out that patrons did not like "seeing their
own faces on the screen when using the service."

Also, significant contingents of the population
are apparently not interested in chat as a communications
tool, no matter how good the service behind it. These
include lawyers and doctors and almost anybody else
without a lot of time on their hands. LSSI had some
abysmal failures with chat services designed especially
for lawyers. Whatever the facts, there are clearly
people who do not take to chat, and if that group populates
the market you're trying to reach, chat may not be
the most effective strategy. Even when dealing with
a population of high school and college students known
to use chat and IM heavily  at least among their
friends  chat may still not work for effective
reference service. Perhaps phone or a combination of
phone and e-mail would work just as well if not better
and certainly cheaper. Or maybe you should follow Google's
and Amazon's model and invest in better Web self-service,
while beefing up traditional reference services to
handle those who still couldn't find what they needed
on your site.

Maybe the communications channel doesn't matter.
Maybe the problem is that your patrons know little
about your existing reference services and what you
can do for them. Maybe you don't really need chat at
all, just better PR. Of course, there are situations
in which some sort of virtual reference technology
clearly is the best and most cost-effective solution
to a particular problem. But we can only reach that
conclusion after considering all the various ways of
solving our problems. Too often in the past few years
perhaps, we've jumped to the conclusion that virtual
reference was the only solution.

You must also consider the impact of the service
on your staff. Can you afford to hire new staff to
handle the increased work load? If not, how do you
propose to fit it into people's existing responsibilities
and what's likely to suffer as a result? Will staff
need a lot of additional training and practice to become
proficient with the technology, or do they already
have most of the needed skills? Just as importantly,
what is your staff's attitude towards the new service?
Are they enthusiastic and committed to seeing it succeed,
or do they think of it as an administrator's pet project?
Sometimes, in our rush to implement virtual reference
over the past few years, we've forced more than a few
librarians behind chat terminals who have no interest
or desire to be there. And that can prove frustrating
for the librarian and patron alike.

Of course, if you don't have the capacity or the
enthusiasm among your own staff, you could always consider
hiring your service out to a reference contractor in
whole or in part. Before you choose that option, consider
the costs of outsourcing compared with the costs of
doing it in-house and the potential effect on the quality
and character of your reference services. Here again,
the staff impact can vary markedly across different
methods of offering the same service. E-mail reference,
for example, may be much easier to integrate into existing
reference operations than setting up a whole new chat
service that may require considerable training and
continuous monitoring. Phone service has its own requirements,
while improving Web self-service may reduce the workload
on the reference staff. The important thing to remember
here is that staff are a critical factor in any reference
service. You need to weigh the effect the service may
have on them just as carefully as you would any of
the other factors discussed.

You also need to do some serious thinking about
whether your reference staff, your library, and your
library's budget are adequate to handle the amount
of reference traffic you expect to get. Can your service
scale to meet the potential demand? Is it sustainable
over the long haul? A lot of us jumped into virtual
reference in the early days with starry eyes, thinking
that all we had to do was open up shop on the Web and
in no time at all we'd be right up there with WebHelp  handling
20,000 questions per day. Of course that never happened,
and it is a very good thing it didn't, because with
an answer time of 15 minutes per question (which we
now know is pretty normal for chat reference), standard
staffing calculators show that it would take a crew
of 252 reference librarians working 24 hours a day
to handle that level of demand. Since most librarians
simply refuse to work 24 hours a day (slackers!), we'd
actually need to hire three 8-hour shifts of 252 librarians
each, or a total of 756 brand reference staff, to handle
the level of business many of us had hoped we'd get.
There's no library  nor even group of libraries  at
present that could have easily ramped up for that level
of staffing, at least not without securing significant
additional budget and other resources.

At an average rate of six questions per day, the
effect of chat services on existing reference staff
has been pretty negligible. But next time we may not
be so lucky. We need to think carefully about the level
of demand and amount of traffic we might reasonably
expect to see if a proposed reference service succeeds.
We need to know in advance where we will get the budget,
staff, and other resources needed to handle success.
In some cases, we may find the cost of answering questions
using a particular reference technology simply too
great; great success might bankrupt us. If that's going
to happen, it's much better to know about it up front
than several months or years down the road when you
find yourself running out of money and facing the public
relations nightmare of cutting off thousands of patrons
from a service they've come to depend upon. Remember,
it was not lack of traffic that killed most of the
commercial reference services, it was lack of a sustainable
business model to handle the traffic they got. Libraries
are no different.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, how do the
costs and benefits of building and operating a chat
reference service compare with the costs and benefits
of other things the library could do with that same
money? All libraries operate on pretty limited budgets;
when we choose to do one thing, we usually have to
choose not to do something else. Under those circumstances,
librarians must keep their priorities straight to insure
that they get the maximum mileage out of each dollar
spent. So just how much is chat reference worth to
us, or more importantly, how much is it worth to our
patrons? Suppose that a library will have to cancel
50 current serial titles in order to afford a new virtual
reference service? Is that trade-off worth it? If you
answered yes, would it still be worth it if your chat
service only averaged six questions per day? If not,
how many questions would you need to justify the cost?
And what if a large percentage of your chat patrons
could have easily used other methods of contacting
you  like phone or e-mail  and just chose
not to do so? The cost may not always involve canceling
materials. It could mean Sunday hours your library
is not open or classroom instructions your librarians
do not offer or Web sites that don't get built or updated,
or any of a thousand of other levies both major and
minor. But there's nothing unusual in that, virtually
everything we do in a library comes at a price, the
question each of us has to answer is whether that price
is worth the value we received in return in comparison
to the price and value of other projects, services,
or collections we may have had to forgo to pay for
virtual reference.

These are the critical questions librarians should
ask themselves about virtual reference. There is no
one right answer to any of them. Each is something
individual librarians must figure out for themselves
based on their own circumstances, the needs and characteristics
of their patrons, and the staff and resources available.
Nor are there any easy answers. There are often many
different ways and technologies that could accomplish
a similar purpose. It takes careful and deliberate
consideration to figure out what is most appropriate
and cost-effective for a given library and a given
set of patrons.

The purpose of this paper has not been to argue
for or against chat, but rather to suggest that libraries
should approach the whole issue of virtual reference
with much more careful and deliberate consideration.
In the past few years much of the profession seems
to have been gripped by a sort of "irrational exuberance" (to
borrow a phrase from Alan Greenspan) about the prospects
of virtual reference. Many of us saw it as a kind of
panacea for all that ailed us. And for awhile there,
it seemed that no matter what the problem was, or who
the patrons were, or what we were trying to accomplish  the
answer was always "chat."

The answer is not that we should now discard chat
and go chasing after the next new technology to attract
the attention of the reference cognoscenti. The answer
is that we all need to give the whole issue of how
best to provide reference services careful thought
and analysis. We must weigh the costs and benefits
of any new approach. We cannot be wooed by the technology
or become terrified that the rest of the world would
pass us by if we did not adopt the latest thing. Our
funds are too limited and our reference and basic library
services far too important to squander money on services
that don't work. So let's try to be more careful and
intentional as we look for the best ways to provide
reference and library services in the future. Our patrons
and the communities we serve deserve no less.

Steve Coffman is vice president for business
development with LSSI (Library Systems and Services
Inc.), a company that provides professional library
services to a wide variety of institutions. Steve oversees
the design of new library products and services for
LSSI. His current work focuses on developing new funding
and operating models. Steve was one of the pioneers
of the virtual reference "movement" and in his work
at LSSI, he has helped thousands of libraries around
the world to move their reference services to the Web.
He's written a recent book on the topic called Going
Live! Starting and Running a Virtual Reference Service (ALA
Editions). Prior to LSSI, Steve worked at the County
of Los Angeles Public Library as Director of FYI, the
County's Business Research Service.

Linda Arret is an independent consultant specializing
in digital reference services. She has extensive experience
as a reference librarian in academic and government
libraries, including 25 years' experience in leading
and implementing systems-based reference services at
the Library of Congress, where she developed generations
of digital reference services, was the project coordinator
for the early and pilot stages of QuestionPoint, and
helped coordinate NISO's first steps toward standards
in digital reference. Linda can be reached at linda.arret@verizon.net.